anything that is fourteen lines
is secretly about my mother. don’t let the cardinals
or the murky bodies of water fool you. when i sent
you work about the songbirds, i was telling you about
how thick the stitches on her stomach were. how
serum and blood would bloat them, and ooze through
four sets of sheets. if you ever received that packet
of ocean poems in the mail, they were all about the
summer i was freshly sixteen—or was i fourteen—
potentially i was twenty—and her retina detached.
the summer she wore the svelte purple eyepatch
to match the ocular bruising and when my uncle or
one of her boyfriends offered more than soup or brief
visit, said “no, only Sydney” or did she say “i only trust
Sydney”—“only she will” or “only she will do it right.”
Note: originally published in Booth.
Golden Glosa with Squeegee & Saxophone
“And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes—"
—Toni Morrison Song of Soloman
You make your living pickpocketing raven feathers from skyscraper window seals and
husking pistachios with saxophonist’s tongue—talking
about you’re on god’s timing, going on about
how you’ve got plans to spit a shell so far into the dark
it’ll come back scorched and dictating the standards of a new jazz. You
tell me that you’ve been composing under bosun’s chair, that you think
you’ve got a classic, that you just need to hold something. Shit’s dark
baby sis. This has always been the gully between us: the ‘is’
of you, your perpetual being, your conscious eyes declaring what is just
and talking about dark. You think dark is just one
shade of living. To you dark’s not the color
of oxtails rationed, not the collapsed flare of our nostrils, but
the fact that the two nickels you got laughing it
up in jean pocket, rubbing together when you strut squeegee down main street ain’t
coming from the Kentucky brined palms of the manager down at the jazz club. There're
only a few hands that’ll slide you a check: our mother’s, or a nine to five,
Sheila’s from the sperm bank with the rubies in her incisors or
mine. You, the oldest, bucktoothed and six
years ahead believing a regular set to be a pigmented life—tones, kinds,
color—but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of
living color worth coveting and they’re all black—black
as our necks come August, black as your first saxophone case. Some-
times I wish you remembered when we lived with Silky.
Her window garden of sweet basil and rosemary sprigs, the way she said sun like some.
The afternoons you would traverse basement crowded with woolly
haired Black Santas, her camo wrapped treadmill and the tire-some
maze of our grandmother’s woodwinds. I wish you remembered just
cruising on Silky’s corduroy-legged lap and blowing into sax till you were empty.
We were among the things Silky had left of Grandmother: some brass, some
black, some silky, some woolly, some just empty, some like
kin. Now look at you, with soap, raven’s shit and living caulking your fingers.
Begging with savant’s brow and held out hand, callus and
lifelines knotted above your wrists. You don’t remember what it
means to be small and wrinkled as plum pit, don’t
remember what it is to busy your mouth with ligature, to trust sound as sound as sound, to stay
unified with the reeds. Brother, you got all your goodwill vaulted in the parts of your face still
dark as sixth grade. Got on thinking your mouth’ll keep me giving, it
will keep blackbirds going north, old brass rusting. But you know well as I do that what moves
you to genius ain’t in the talk—it’s in the ulna, the carpals and
fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes.
W. Coleman in L.A.
after “American Sonnet 51”
while living in
Watts, i wiped my
eyes last
first the girl, boy, boy—re-incarnation
just a rotary ringing, i
heard sob, ring, weep, ring; i inoculated
Coltrane into the boom box so i could hear myself
think. in those days i worshipped
the big tipper, the 323, the copper breasts in
the magazines, the
scraps on which to erect a temple
first, then a sonnet, i
waited, and the old phone rang, and as always
the children cried, and i wrote ‘till the pencil wore
down past the ferrule. ‘till my
fingers burgeoned calluses mink,
‘till the lining of my good coat
was all scribble, clementine ink. and to
think i spent the long lines at the
grocer, the liquor store, the laundromat
running from the noise and
the orange juice the kids drank,
the snot pale
as a good champagne
that’d drip from their flared nostrils—with
two napkins: one with my
poems, the other a quick recipe for soft-boiled
paprika sprinkled eggs.
